Would disabling my laptop screen as a display increase performance?

[jensbodal]

I need to squeeze 1 more month of life out of using my Vostro 1400 as my primary computer, and I am wondering if it would be beneficial in anyways to disable my laptop as a monitor while I use my external display.

I'm only trying to play WoW/SC2 on it, and I love the multimonitor for desktop use, but am I wrong in thinking I get better FPS and general performance by disabling my laptop as a display or is it all in my head?

If it matters my monitor is a V233H and my GPU is a Mobile Intel 965 Express. I know I will get worse performance by using my external monitor which uses a large resolution thus putting more stress on the GPU, but I am curious if also having my laptop enabled as a display is a bad idea.

 

[lambchops511]

yeah.. u'll get better performance when running 3D stuff because on older cards only one screen can be targetted for 3D rendering..wont make a difference in 2D mode tho.

and u gain a little bit by not needing an extra screen's worth of screen buffer memory

 

[lxskllr]

Can't you test it with, and without the extra monitor? Off the cuff, I'd say performance would be worse running 2 monitors. You're pushing more pixels, and there's more overhead assigning objects to display.

 

[jensbodal]

My testing is just basically experience, it seems like I get better FPS but I wasn't sure if I was just telling myself that because it seemed logical. I guess I was just hoping I was wrong.

I guess I will make display profiles in Ultramon for 1 and 2 monitor and manually switch between the two.

 

[mfenn]

Any performance gain will be minimal because displaying a 2d desktop is not exactly stressful. You're looking to gain a few MB of framebuffer by disabling the other monitor.

 

[jensbodal]

I think the problem is I was testing this with SC2 and not WoW. SC2 is just too much for my laptop, WoW worked the same as always. I thought they were more similar in terms of system requirements, but Starcraft definitely requires a bit more.